Exile sharpened Munif’s sense of resource wealth as squandered time

Evidence

Munif was angered by the lost ground of the Gulf States—the geological, historical, and political lost ground. He was well aware that the energy wars are time wars as well; the temporal debt that the Gulf States had incurred pained him—how they had frittered away their resource wealth, betraying both past and future generations. His own exile—his inhabited impermanence—surely quickened his responsiveness to the soaring and plummeting of historical fortunes, to the unstable, fleeting riches of the petroleum age, an age whose bounty he saw squandered by a failure to provide—at a national, regional, and planetary level—for its own provisionality. — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 280

Categorization

• XREF: ‘Temporal debt betraying both past and future generations’ restates Nixon’s transgenerational slow violence from ch3, where harms outlast the generation that caused them. — connects to: Updike’s individualist suburban regionalism contrasts with Munif’s transnational collective vision — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 247; Deracination shaped Munif’s imagination of petro-capitalism’s uprooted communities — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 248; Munif frames petro-despotism as self-immolating worship of oil time — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 279